The following sound fossil has been exhumed from the future, somewhere in the vicinity of latitude 51° longitude zero.

When we began recovering information from the time-mines, in the form of temporal core-samples, we made a discovery:

all matter is malleable, and in it time can be recorded,

Just as trees keep track of the seasons, diamonds trap the images of their surroundings and even stone can be a tape.

The question is how to best interpret it.

In the case of this sample, it has been sonified, in order to hear the post mordayal sounds of that which is coming.

In the popular askings and graspings of our time, there is one particular known:

our climate cassandras say it again and again:

the king tide is coming!

So stop where you are.

Close your eyes.

And from the lifeboat of now, look down into the depths and see what becomes of this city, our lovely Londinium, our beloved Babylondon,

See, how she has turned into a watery shadow.

Her triumphs and follies the stuff of unsung epics, un spoken legends, wordless poems floating in a manless time.

This place is remnant of no body’s memory, it is the environs of indifferent species, outgrown giga fauna expanding beneath a swelling sun.

Look down, and see the road you are on now.

It is refracted many leagues beneath the surface, Its twists of silver concrete beneath a flickering current. It’s almost pretty. Like many of the roads it is graceful but broken.

A sputter instead of a slide.

Now let us take our vessel under the water, and you will see the bridges of London, great spans stretching over serene gullies. The freshwater Thames now a tropical haze of blue green saline.

Nektonic lurkers watch you from beyond your sight, you progress to the east.

Eventually you come to the white giants of Essex, pride of what was once the largest off-shore windfarm in the world. You paddle through the spokes of the two-hundred and seventine turbines – guardians of an estuary that is now an underwater canyon.

Still brilliant white in the marine half-light, you watch them as they turn, soft and slow and webbed in plastic, They stand as Ironic monuments to the pathetic efforts of our time.

After some while tilting at the windmills, you arrive at a plateau.

It was once a car park for taxi cabs. Now it is a forest of greasy kalp.

Swaying in the circulatory system of the sea. Each vehicle squats like a sprouting bulb, at the base of long thin stems of spilt oil.

You see jellyfish the color of antifreeze.

They make aimless rounds, spreading their larva in an uneven whorl.

These cluster around the clutch and pedals, nurseries in the burst ribcage of a cab driver.

At the abracksial tip of every leaking stamen there is a slick of rainbow grease, toxic pollen for the fishes to collect.

This petro forest, and the tainted jellyfish who haunt it, are a cruel reminder of the jetsam we did not jettison in time. You leave the grove in sorrow.

But know this, right after the deluge – it was human bodies that drifted like so much plankton.

The city became feed for our inheritors, meek organisms of the late anthropicene, blooms of flesh-eating bacteria, aquatic mega rats and mutant roaches now at home in water.